Applies a philosophical analysis of the natural sciences to the social sciences.

Friends since childhood, Anais Darnby and Lindsay Markham have long harbored a secret passion for one another. When they finally confess their love, their future together seems assured, sealed with their searing embrace. But when a debauched Lindsay is seduced by a scheming socialite, a devastated Anais seeks refuge in another man's bed while Lindsay retreats to the exotic East. There, he is seduced again--this time by the alluring red smoke and sinister beauty of opium. Back home, Lindsay's addiction is (...) fed by the vogue for all things Oriental--especially its sensual pleasures--in fashionable London society. In his lucid moments, Lindsay still lusts after Anais, who can neither allow him near nor forget his smoldering touch. Tortured by two obsessions--opium and Anais--Lindsay must ultimately decide which is the one he truly cannot live without. (shrink)

First published in 1974. As logician, economist, political theorist, practical politician and active champion of social freedom, John Stuart Mill is a figure of continuing importance. In this book the author does full justice to the range of Mill's achievements, providing an introductory guide to his most important and best known writings including Autobiography,A System of Logic,Utilitarianism,Liberty, and The Subjugation of Women. In their treatment of his works, the author seeks to emphasise Mill's approach to those issues -- education, the (...) conflict between social order and individual freedom, the unresolved state of the social sciences, rights and duties of citizens in a democratic state -- which remain most alive to us today. At the same time Mill is seen as part of his own age, responding to the anxieties that beset his contemporaries. This book will be of interest to students of politics and philosophy. (shrink)

"When John Dewey died in 1952, he was memorialized as America's most famous philosopher, revered by liberal educators and deplored by conservatives, but universally acknowledged as his country's intellectual voice. Many things conspired to give Dewey an extraordinary intellectual eminence: He was immensely long-lived and immensely prolific; he died in his ninety-third year, and his intellectual productivity hardly slackened until his eighties." "Professor Alan Ryan offers new insights into Dewey's many achievements, his character, and the era in which (...) his scholarship had a remarkable impact. He investigates the question of what an American audience wanted from a public philosopher - from an intellectual figure whose credentials came from his academic standing as a philosopher, but whose audience was much wider than an academic one." "Ryan argues that Dewey's "religious" outlook illuminates his politics much more vividly than it does the politics of religion as ordinarily conceived. He examines how Dewey fit into the American radical tradition, how he was and was not like his transatlantic contemporaries, why he could for so long practice a form of philosophical inquiry that became unfashionable in England after 1914 at the latest."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

This collection of essays by philosophers, political theorists, and social critics ranges over two millennia--from the ideas of Plato and Aristotle to those of contemporary thinkers such as John Rawls and Robert Nozick. It examines the nature of justice, its importance in human life, and its place among the other virtues. The scope of the collection gives a clear picture of the differences and continuities that have marked the debate: Plato's emphasis on the ideal of "sticking to one's task" contrasts (...) with the modern emphasis on individual rights, while the account of justice as part of the law of nature offered by Aristotle and Cicero contrasts with Hume's analysis of justice as an artificial virtue. Alan Ryan's introductory essay emphasizes the stringency of justice--showing how its demands can conflict with considerations of the general welfare. The book concludes with a discussion of Marx's view that justice is perhaps merely a concession to a world of scarcity and selfishness created by capitalist necessities. An excellent guide to interpretations of one of the central values of political life and thought, this book will interest students and scholars of political theory and philosophy. (shrink)

Writers of very different persuasions have relied on arguments about self-ownership; in recent years, it is libertarians who have rested their political theory on self-ownership, but Grotian authoritarianism rested on similar foundations, and, even though it matters a good deal that Hegel did not adopt a full-blown theory of self-ownership, so did Hegel's liberal-conservatism. Whether the high tide of the idea has passed it is hard to say. One testimony to its popularity was the fact that G. A. Cohen for (...) a time thought that the doctrine of self-ownership was so powerful that an egalitarian like himself had to come to terms with it; but he has since changed his mind. I have tackled the topic of self-ownership glancingly elsewhere, but have not hitherto tried to pull together the observations I have made in passing on those occasions. The view I have taken for granted and here defend is that self-ownership is not an illuminating notion—except in contexts that are unattractive to anyone of libertarian tastes. (shrink)

Including significant passages from The Prince, The Discourses, The Art of War and History of Florence, this illuminating book explores the influence of Machiavelli, who was often reviled as a teacher of evil, on the modern state.

Explores Russell's activities as a polemicist, agitator, educator, and popularizer and discusses the evolution of his moral philosophy and its application, including his final battle against American intervention in Vietnam.

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) was born in London, son of the Scottish historian of India and philosopher, James Mill, by whom he was educated in, among other things, the principles of British empiricism and Benthamite utilitarianism. Like his father, he worked for the East India Company, being in charge of the Company's relations with the native states 1836–1856, and head of the examiner's office from 1856 until the powers of the Company were transferred in 1858. The book which established Mill (...) as a philosopher was his System of Logic (1843), described in its full title as ‘a connected view of the principles of evidence and the methods of scientific investigation’. Book 6 of the System of Logic was ‘On the logic of the moral sciences’, and at the end of it Mill declared, without trying to justify it, his opinion that there is a ‘general principle to which all rules of practice ought to conform’; namely that of ‘conduciveness to the happiness of mankind, or rather, of all sentient beings’. For example, we should keep our promises not because we can see intuitively the truth of the precept, but because it passes the utilitarian test. Mill's justification for this opinion was in his Utilitarianism (1863). Mill's version of utilitarianism differed from Bentham's in that he recognized not only quantitative but also qualitative differences between pleasures. (shrink)

This paper begins with some brief reflections on the 19th century apprehensions of Tocqueville and Mill and their relevance to ourselves, and goes on to ask for what and for whom universities exist. There is no incontrovertible answer, but one can distinguish two ideal types of a modern university, as I do. I praise one of them, without being dismissive of the others, and pose some problems about their institutionalization, and raise some old questions about the rights of citizens and (...) the privileges of guilds. I finally discuss the threats to free inquiry posed by well-intentioned governments in a British - rather than an American or European - context, recurring to themes from Tocqueville and Mill. (shrink)

In this paper I intend to do two things. The first is to discuss a method of doing philosophy, the method of ‘ordinary language’ philosophy, as it is commonly and misleadingly called. (Its other common title: ‘Oxford Philosophy’ is even more misleading, since the roots of the method lie in Cambridge, and many of the most flourishing branches are in the United States rather than England.)If it needs a name, perhaps the best is—adapting Popper to our purpose—‘piecemeal philosophical engineering’. Such (...) a title would emphasise the attention to detail and the caution about conclusions that characterise the best of such work. The second aim of this paper is to apply the method thus discussed and defended to three questions connected with the concept of freedom. These problems arise out of three recent discussions of freedom—Thought and Action and Spinoza and the Idea of Freedom by Professor Hampshire, and Two Concepts of Liberty by Professor Berlin. (shrink)

The essay approaches the question: Older Than What; Newer Than What? as naively as possible; it begins by asking whether there can be, and perhaps was, liberalism before the word was coined, and argues that there could have been but as a matter of fact was not. It then changes tack to ask whether liberalism is in essence a modern phenomenon, and answers that it is. This, however, raises the further question of what, if anything, lends coherence to modern forms (...) of liberalism. The paper then argues that, contrary to Rawls, it is a comprehensive, or more narrowly ‘autonomist,’ conception of liberalism that provides the only reliable basis in ethics, metaphysics, and in a view of human nature for more limited forms of liberalism. It is argued throughout that liberalism so construed is a contentious creed, and that liberals should not be daunted by that fact. (shrink)

On Marx -- Selections -- A note on the selections -- Notes on James Mill -- The German ideology -- Theses on Feuerbach -- The Communist manifesto -- Capital -- The civil war in France -- Critique of the Gotha programme.

Excerpt: …I here tackle three topics: first, the lowly place of happiness among the goals of political action in the great tradition of political thought; second, the novelty of the idea of happiness is the proper aim or public policy; and last, the importance of the distinction between what was aptly described by T.H. Green as "hindering hindrances to the good life" and the promotion of happiness by political action. As that might suggest, I shall say some unkind things about (...) the paternalism implicit in some recent emphasis on happiness as an object of state action. (shrink)